Intel is drumming up support for its latest 50-core Knights Corner and Xeon E5 server chips, which are key elements in the company's plans to scale performance while reducing power consumption moving toward an exascale supercomputer by 2018.

Well, if their C++ compiler holds up to its promises and if they were able at some point to put this thing inside desktop/server CPUs, with the amount of standardization and open documentation that current CPUs get, this could mean an amount of computational power that's comparable to a GPU, but without having to deal with buggy and non-standard drivers + silly GPU-specific APIs.